Ezra Klein

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper Now that I have your attention, I’d like to make an announcement. Arnold, you’d better run, because the Pepper Posse is coming after you. That’s right – a Pepper Posse. As of tomorrow, the Daily Pepper will become a group blog, featuring the writing of Poverty Barn and Pell-Mell. […]

By Ezra Everybody should read this post of Kevin’s. Everybody. And, while you ingest it, think about this: in other countries, the idea that your “insurance” even can be denied simply doesn’t exist. Forget the circumstances, for get disasters, you don’t even have clerical errors. Whether you’re displaced, traveling, or just ill, when you enter […]

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math The indominable Oliver Willis says that increasing the perception that Democrats “stand for something” is just a matter of not flitting from issue to issue. There’s something to that; both the Kerry and Gore campaigns did a lot of flitting. So, less of that, please. I do want […]

By Ezra Best way to start my piece on this is with one of my favorite Onion articles: “The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar workers in Middle America, and the God-fearing underpriviledged minorities who voted George […]

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf The key statistic from the post below is a striking one indeed. Shakespeare’s Sister points out that in 2004, the national median income was $35,100, while the median income of the electorate was $55,300. In other words, poor people are voting at a much lower rate than rich people. Then […]

Shakes here… Ezra’s post, The Politics of Mobilization, and Nicholas’ post, The Mostly Unfuzzy Math of William Galston & Elaine Kamarck, each refer to studies that make recommendations to the Democrats based on voter data. What strikes me in both cases is that the pictures drawn are incomplete. The current electorate is not the same […]

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, authors of the seminal work “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency“, a post-game analysis of the 1988 election that heavily influenced the DLC’s (and therefore Bill Clinton’s) electoral strategy, have updated their ideas for the modern electoral environment in “The Politics […]

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper, who has OD’d on Miers and needs a palate cleanser If it’s one thing I’ve noticed about the New York Times, it’s that once a problem begins to hit the suburbs, it’s all of a sudden a VERY BIG DEAL. Class stratification hits the ‘burbs? Write up a whole […]

RedState may believe in the independence of the Court, but they’re sure as hell not above a little obsequious persuasion…

On the subject of Miers’ qualifications, which I haven’t written much about, I think folks are conflating two very separate things: the qualifications a Supreme Court Justice needs to have and the qualifications a Justice ought to have. On the first, Miers is probably just fine — a longtime lawyer, literate, smart enough to understand […]